Excellent. If we're going to get these fuckers down to common carrier status, we'll need to be able to cite to them actually abusing customers because they're a dangerously unregulated monopoly. It would be nice if we could find evidence and then sue Verizon for lying about it.*

(Or more likely, those of us with Verizon accounts will participate in binding arbitration against Verizon. Worst-case scenario, it's still a way to bleed some money from these bastards.)

i get the indian kid did not know what he was saying, but he represents the company and he said that as a representative of the company. It really isn't the end users' fault that the company is so big that there isn't anyone that can answer simple questions.

if there is no traffic shaping, that is pretty easy training to pass down.

I have the 75/35 FiOS package and consistently get around 100/50 when I run a speedtest. I barely get SD quality when streaming Netflix even though the shows are capable of HD.

I was getting HD streams around Christmas time but I can't pinpoint the exact date the quality started turning to crap. It was definitely less than a month ago, right around the Net Neutrality ruling though.

I am really confused and perplexed by this blog post and do not understand how Ars Technica would consider it news. The chat representative was clearly confused and didn't understand what he was saying and the traceroutes presented as evidence show no issues whatsoever.

i get the indian kid did not know what he was saying, but he represents the company and he said that as a representative of the company. It really isn't the end users' fault that the company is so big that there isn't anyone that can answer simple questions.

if there is no traffic shaping, that is pretty easy training to pass down.

But that doesn't excuse him for taking the representatives word as gospel.

You wouldn't expect someone on the fast food line to know corporate policy on food sourcing would you?

I have the 75/35 FiOS package and consistently get around 100/50 when I run a speedtest. I barely get SD quality when streaming Netflix even though the shows are capable of HD.

I was getting HD streams around Christmas time but I can't pinpoint the exact date the quality started turning to crap. It was definitely less than a month ago, right around the Net Neutrality ruling though.

Excellent. If we're going to get these fuckers down to common carrier status, we'll need to be able to cite to them actually abusing customers because they're a dangerously unregulated monopoly. It would be nice if we could find evidence and then sue Verizon for lying about it.*

(Or more likely, those of us with Verizon accounts will participate in binding arbitration against Verizon. Worst-case scenario, it's still a way to bleed some money from these bastards.)

Per the TOS:

"ARBITRATION OR SMALL CLAIMS ACTIONS.

........ YOU AND VERIZON BOTH AGREE TO RESOLVE DISPUTES ONLY BY ARBITRATION OR IN SMALL CLAIMS COURT

The story that Verizon is throttling 3rd parties is all over the net right now. With the loss of the FCC's neutrality powers, it's a pretty big deal. This article provides a dip into the reality of the situation (for now). That's the point of this article – it refutes a widely circulating story/rumor. I thought that was kind of obvious >_>

Excellent. If we're going to get these fuckers down to common carrier status, we'll need to be able to cite to them actually abusing customers because they're a dangerously unregulated monopoly. It would be nice if we could find evidence and then sue Verizon for lying about it.*

(Or more likely, those of us with Verizon accounts will participate in binding arbitration against Verizon. Worst-case scenario, it's still a way to bleed some money from these bastards.)

Per the TOS:

"ARBITRATION OR SMALL CLAIMS ACTIONS.

........ YOU AND VERIZON BOTH AGREE TO RESOLVE DISPUTES ONLY BY ARBITRATION OR IN SMALL CLAIMS COURT

3 THIS AGREEMENT DOES NOT ALLOW CLASS OR COLLECTIVE ARBITRATIONS".

So, nope.

One at a time and nothing more than small claims.

That's what I meant the first time. Class-action arbitration isn't a thing that actually happens in the real world. "We" would be bleeding Verizon by forcing them to defend individual claims on multiple fronts. That's the scenario where binding individual arbitration causes the contracting company to actually lose money.

Also, if the above is what is actually in the contract, you'd just have to argue a damages amount over small claims and then say the arbitration clause was limited to amounts that fall under the subject matter jurisdiction of small claims court.

I have the 75/35 FiOS package and consistently get around 100/50 when I run a speedtest. I barely get SD quality when streaming Netflix even though the shows are capable of HD.

I was getting HD streams around Christmas time but I can't pinpoint the exact date the quality started turning to crap. It was definitely less than a month ago, right around the Net Neutrality ruling though.

I have no other problems with other streaming/downloading.

well my Netflix plays fine. find a friend with fast century link and tunnel to them. (not me, i only have 5 up)

Netflix just needs a speed test thing like YouTube had (when did it go away?). they could aggregate the data and give a better idea of what is happening.

I have the 75/35 FiOS package and consistently get around 100/50 when I run a speedtest. I barely get SD quality when streaming Netflix even though the shows are capable of HD.

I was getting HD streams around Christmas time but I can't pinpoint the exact date the quality started turning to crap. It was definitely less than a month ago, right around the Net Neutrality ruling though.

I have no other problems with other streaming/downloading.

well my Netflix plays fine. find a friend with fast century link and tunnel to them. (not me, i only have 5 up)

Netflix just needs a speed test thing like YouTube had (when did it go away?). they could aggregate the data and give a better idea of what is happening.

The story that Verizon is throttling 3rd parties is all over the net right now. With the loss of the FCC's neutrality powers, it's a pretty big deal. This article provides a dip into the reality of the situation (for now). That's the point of this article – it refutes a widely circulating story/rumor. I thought that was kind of obvious >_>

Exactly. I was surprised this thing spread the way it did. People are always doing traceroutes and saying it proves an ISP is throttling, but this time there was also the confused customer service rep and it became a big news story without anyone actually analyzing whether the blog post proved anything. The fact that it happened right after the court decision helped it spread too, but that was really just a coincidence.

This is a common complaint among people I know here in the Pittsburgh area. I have Comcast, and seldom have these congestion problems. Friends with FiOS end up with an utterly worthless connection during peak hours. I'm pretty sure that right now, it's just Verizon not providing enough bandwidth to nodes, as well as apparently not providing enough peering bandwidth.

Actually, there is plenty of evidence, and it's not hard to prove. I pay Comcast for fifty megabit, I get USENET speeds of 51mbit when I set my server to SSL out of Asia over fifty connections. US based servers? Six, maybe.

ARS can buy 6 VPN accounts from around the US, and do an analysis of different ISP and download speeds, Netflix connections, etc - to compare tracert hops and speeds when the traffic in different types of tunnels versus natively.

Run some torrents while you are at it, do some erlang calculations, and spend at least as much time doing it as you did drinking soylent and I bet the results end up as ammunition to make this bs a federal crime.

The story that Verizon is throttling 3rd parties is all over the net right now. With the loss of the FCC's neutrality powers, it's a pretty big deal. This article provides a dip into the reality of the situation (for now). That's the point of this article – it refutes a widely circulating story/rumor. I thought that was kind of obvious >_>

Yeah, the loss of net neutrality is a huge deal. It doesn't mean blog posts with meaningless trace routes and CSR baiting have any merit at all. It actually detracts from the seriousness and authenticity of the issue.

I have the 75/35 FiOS package and consistently get around 100/50 when I run a speedtest. I barely get SD quality when streaming Netflix even though the shows are capable of HD.

I was getting HD streams around Christmas time but I can't pinpoint the exact date the quality started turning to crap. It was definitely less than a month ago, right around the Net Neutrality ruling though.

I have no other problems with other streaming/downloading.

It costs $, but try a VPN for streaming.

If you suddenly get HD, then Verizon's doing something hinky.

Actually, that's not entirely true. It just means that your route to your streaming server could be congested, but since you are now routing a different path to your VPN server, which then takes another route to potentially a different streaming server altogether, you are taking a path with less congestion.

The story that Verizon is throttling 3rd parties is all over the net right now. With the loss of the FCC's neutrality powers, it's a pretty big deal. This article provides a dip into the reality of the situation (for now). That's the point of this article – it refutes a widely circulating story/rumor. I thought that was kind of obvious >_>

Yeah, the loss of net neutrality is a huge deal. It doesn't mean blog posts with meaningless trace routes and CSR baiting have any merit at all. It actually detracts from the seriousness and authenticity of the issue.

I mean, i agree in an honor sense. but if you think that proving this issue scientifically is better than just having the local news say "Verizon Admits it slows Netflix traffic after they win the right to do it" i don't think the world works the way you think it does.

The best thing that can happen for net neutrality is for this to go national and then have Obama defend Verizon.

Actually, there is plenty of evidence, and it's not hard to prove. I pay Comcast for fifty megabit, I get USENET speeds of 51mbit when I set my server to SSL out of Asia over fifty connections. US based servers? Six, maybe.

ARS can buy 6 VPN accounts from around the US, and do an analysis of different ISP and download speeds, Netflix connections, etc - to compare tracert hops and speeds when the traffic in different types of tunnels versus natively.

Run some torrents while you are at it, do some erlang calculations, and spend at least as much time doing it as you did drinking soylent and I bet the results end up as ammunition to make this bs a federal crime.

Really about the only thing you can eliminate as a possible cause with testing from your end of the connection is local congestion and it is also the easiest to test. If you can fire up a speed test or a torrent or a download from somewhere else or just about any other test you can come up with and get good performance then you've eliminated the local congestion as the cause of the issue. Anything beyond that it's pretty much impossible to tell because too many things are changing and you don't have enough information to tell which of the dozen things that changed is the cause of the issue.

This is a common complaint among people I know here in the Pittsburgh area. I have Comcast, and seldom have these congestion problems. Friends with FiOS end up with an utterly worthless connection during peak hours. I'm pretty sure that right now, it's just Verizon not providing enough bandwidth to nodes, as well as apparently not providing enough peering bandwidth.

I have Comcast in Tennessee (no other choice for broadband for me actually) and my connection to any host that the route goes through Cogent drops to dial-up speeds in evenings and on weekends. It's been that way for around a year now. I really wish Comcast would get over themselves and upgrade their Cogent routers because this is ridiculous and is impacting a LOT more than just Netflix.

Of course this is the same Comcast that can't keep their bandwidth meter accessible and has expanded their quota trials to my area so now I get charged if I go over the new quota. It's unavailable so often I have started recording all my access attempts to use to file a complaint with the public utilities commission and FCC in the future about it. Pretty sure charging for overages when the meter is unavailable 90% of the time isn't legal.

Looking at the traceroutes the user provided, there aren't any obvious signs of congestion (which would usually show up as substantial variation in the three response times in each hop). If anything, the business line seems to be seeing a bit more latency variance, but there's too little data to say much, other than it looks like both paths seem to be working fairly well.

Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to really know what's going on without seeing a tcpdump log or the like, where you can get some clues. If the ISP is throttling Netflix specifically, you might see unusually large packet loss rates there, relative to other traffic. But that could also be happening on congested links upstream. It's not usually possible to figure out *where* a packet got dropped, though sometimes you can make informed guesses if there's other data about the links visible, at least if it's congestion-related.

It is generally possible to figure out what's happening, but it takes a lot more data about multiple sessions to different places from the user's endpoint to really get any sort of handle on things. Essentially you have to construct a careful set of experiments after piecing together the relevant parts of the network topology. And even there you're at the mercy of all kinds of things like multipath load-splitting, where different sessions may route over different routes than you might see with trace route.

Would congestion cause latency issues and bad ping spikes while gaming on a 50 megabit cable connection? For the past few months, I've been experiencing nasty ping spikes when playing Quake Live (West coast servers), and so far, nothing the cable company has done has fixed it.

"As tempting as it may be when frustrated that your Internet connection isn't working as well as it should be, it's simply not fair to ask that kind of question to a low-level support person, much less use a chat transcript to accuse companies of widely unpopular behavior."

Not fair??! How is it not fair??!

Verizon chooses who they hire as tech support. They train them. They use them as the point of contact for customers who have issues using their services.

If Verizon is negligent in this.. and hire unqualified people, and don't train them properly.. who else is to blame but Verizon?

No, it's totally fair to expect to be given correct information by tech support.

"Is Verizon now limiting bandwidth to cloud providers like Amazon's AWS services?""Yes it is limited bandwidth to cloud providers"

Lets be perfectly blunt. All ISP's could be throttling bandwidth for all we know. Its damn hard to tell when Amazon and Netflix do not give you built in tools to figure out where the bandwidth problem is. And I can't tell if its because they know they occasionally have issues in house or not. And all the various speed tests out there are a joke since I'm pretty sure ISP's optimize their network for such tests.All I know is on Shitcast I can sometimes get better connections to Amazon Instant Video and formerly Netflix when I VPNed out of their network. Is this proof? Not even remotely. Honestly if we had real honest to god net neutrality rules in place I'd have no issues having the FCC randomly seeding black boxes around ISP's networks (e.g. consumers homes.) to check for throttling and fine them accordingly. Obviously with consumers consent. But of course this is America. Where such things like that are immediately called socialism.

i get the indian kid did not know what he was saying, but he represents the company and he said that as a representative of the company. It really isn't the end users' fault that the company is so big that there isn't anyone that can answer simple questions.

if there is no traffic shaping, that is pretty easy training to pass down.

But that doesn't excuse him for taking the representatives word as gospel.

You wouldn't expect someone on the fast food line to know corporate policy on food sourcing would you?

No, but I'd expect McDonalds to have an authorized representative explain exactly where the severed penis in my Big Mac came from, and assure the public that it won't happen again. If they can't even do that much...

The fact is, despite the boilerplate in ISP contracts, I think that customers who find their connections to certain networks consistently throttled ought to have a claim of action for fraud--and I hope class-action lawsuits to that effect are being researched right now for filing as soon as sufficient evidence comes to light. Why is Verizon justified in charging customers premiums for premium bandwidth tiers on the one hand, then throttling their access to any networks which refuse to "pay protection" on the other? Unless I'm on the lowest speed tier, and without a big bold disclaimer much more prominent than the fine print which details every service I can expect to be throttled, there'd be potential fraud afoot.

Again I find Peter Bright coming off as overly corporate. If we can't expect competence we contact our ISP's support how are we supposed to know what the actual issue is? Who, Peter, am I supposed to call to get the knowledgeable response that actually answers the question? You seem to let the ISP Verizon off the hook for having poor support that didn't answer the question properly. That said I understand that it is an economic and corporate decision to have know nothings answer the phones.

Even apart from issues with connectivity between providers, there can be bandwidth issues within a company's network. A street of 50 houses might boast 75 megabit per seconds of optic fiber Internet per household, but that doesn't mean that there's (75 × 50) = 3.75 gigabits per second of bandwidth between those houses and the ISP's core network. Those 50 connections might be aggregated into, say, a 1 gigabit link. If everyone in the street is hammering their Internet connection to download Linux ISOs from BitTorrent, they're simply not going to get the 75 Mbps that their connections notionally provide. They'll be limited to an average of 20 Mb/s.

I've had a number of conversations with my ISP Time Warner, with people who sound like they know what they're talking about and was told they expect my connection in reality to be at worst 80% of the stated speed up and down. I find my connection is rarely slower than the stated speed.

Had you changed "download Linux ISOs from BitTorrent" to "download different Linux ISOs from Bittorrent" I would agree, but in your though experiment, everyone on the street is connected to the same switch with a number of them potentially downloading the same torrent. Bittorrent clients are typically aware of network topologies and will attempt to keep traffic in network first. Thus with a gigabit link to the wider internet the Linux ISO (Ubuntu 13.10 883MB 64bit) would arrive in the neighborhood in 7 seconds (with 10% overhead) spread-out amongst our 75 households. A Verizon Fios 75Mbit connection has a 35Mbit upload rate, thus the neighborhood has a 1.71Gb/s upload rate to share the file amongst itself at. This will result in the neighborhood completing the download for everyone in about 3 minutes 36 seconds with a 1:1 upload ratio, thereby establishing them as not leeches. If everyone quits their sharing at that point then the entire neighborhoods connection will be free in 3 minutes 43 seconds. In conclusion, Bittorrent is awesome.

While the amount of GB of Bittorrent traffic is increasing, Bittorrent as a percentage of network traffic is decreasing due to the greater availability of legal options. Perhaps mentioning the combination of Youtube and Netflix would have made for a better example.

I find the remainder of the article solid and agree, but what do you expect us to do when our ISP says something like that? Corporations are know for habitually lying to customers. Was Comcast the ISP that blocked Bittorrent ack packets and sent disconnect signals? It took months of investigation to get them to confess.

The company I work for uses Cogent, one of the main ISPs that netflix does (Netflix use different ones in different locations and for obvious reasons usually multi-sources as well). My co-workers that have Verizon FIOS get less than 10% of the throughput to our servers that people on other ISPs do. In the evenings during peak netflix viewing times, Verizon offers less than 1% of the advertised bandwidth.

I would argue that this question is somewhat moot: "How does that prove throttling, as opposed to congestion?" They are not really different other than one is usually done in software and one is done with hardware. If I replace a 1000base-T card with a 10base-T is that congestion or throttling? The bottomline is the consumer has paid for a certain level of internet service and they are not getting it.

Common wisdom is that 30% of all internet traffic is Netflix therefore if Verizon does not have approximately 30% of their interconnects dedicated to traffic from those networks they are doing de-facto packet shaping.

As far as I can tell, fundamentally the issue comes down to two things. Verizon uses overselling capacity as a way of maintaining their profit margin and partially because that is starting to no longer be a viable strategy they want to charge both their customer and also the sending ISP.

I find the remainder of the article solid and agree, but what do you expect us to do when our ISP says something like that? Corporations are know for habitually lying to customers. Was Comcast the ISP that blocked Bittorrent ack packets and sent disconnect signals? It took months of investigation to get them to confess.

Generally a company doing something you don't like in the past doesn't mean you get to throw out critical thinking skills and assume they're doing something else you don't like now.

The whole situation reeked of confirmation bias and reporters ran with it, because it fits the narrative they painted before. Regardless if it was actually true or not. Journalism isn't indiscriminately believing a guy on a forum with a customer service anecdote and a trace route that says little.

Yes Verizon has some crappy employees that have no clue what they're talking about, but i'm doubtful that a low level representative would have any clue on network management policies. Especially those that could be a PR nightmare if they got out to the public.

For what it's worth, I have Fios (75 down, 35 up) and have no problem watching Netflix in HD as long as I am close enough to my 5GHz Wifi router or use a wired connection. If there is some bottleneck, it's usually far upstream. Unlike most ISPs, Verizon does not oversell its bandwidth as far as the last mile goes. Their network can easily supply 500+ Mbps to everyone, but there isn't any competitive pressure to make them up their offerings as they are the only fiber game in town.

I don't think Verizon is about to start throttling everyone's connections. They know people who pay the extra $50 a month for their higher tiers expect their connection to not be fucked with.

I think Verizon sued the FCC simply so they could prioritize their own IP-home offerings over general traffic, not to lock out Netflix (their cable TV offerings don't actually bring in that much revenue). They have started offering home security products that run over their network. Currently they just sell the devices and allow them to be monitored remotely, but they don't offer a service that alerts law enforcement yet. That may due to regulations on reliability (you wouldn't want the police to not be notified that someone broke into your home because you were torrenting something), and being allowed to guarantee QoS would probably help.

Just a subjective observation:* lived in a condo that only had Cox internet.* moved to a town house with Verizon FIOS.

No real issue I had with Cox. It worked as expected although I feel like a fool whenever I looked at my monthly bill (65). I went with the 2nd best tier of Verizon and pay close to 100 bux. This is what I noticed:

File transfer appears to be steady and fast.Netflix suffers daily.Youtube suffers daily.Amazon suffers daily.VPN into my work is questionable. VOIP fails a lot more often than Cox.

When I say suffers, I mean, I am getting serious performance degradation

I do think Verizon is shaping the bandwidth for competitor's streaming services (I understand that Verizon has a relationship with redbox. I can totally see this happening at Verizon. Some hot shot network engineer sitting there and say we can QOS all this internally and pretend nothing happens externally or just put a throttle at certain vendors ISP peering agreement, etc.

WIth the net neutrality going down the drain, I expect that this will get worse. I am serious thinking about going back to Cox.

I have the 75/35 FiOS package and consistently get around 100/50 when I run a speedtest. I barely get SD quality when streaming Netflix even though the shows are capable of HD.

I was getting HD streams around Christmas time but I can't pinpoint the exact date the quality started turning to crap. It was definitely less than a month ago, right around the Net Neutrality ruling though.

I have no other problems with other streaming/downloading.

I wouldn't put it past Verizon to learn the speed test sites and leave them out of the throttling.

I consistently get less than my advertised speeds, except for (legal) torrents. Linux ISOs (torrent) come in full speed. Anything else, I regard as a crapshoot. You don't know enough to know if its the remote system, the remote ISP, or yours.

I have the 75/35 FiOS package and consistently get around 100/50 when I run a speedtest. I barely get SD quality when streaming Netflix even though the shows are capable of HD.

I was getting HD streams around Christmas time but I can't pinpoint the exact date the quality started turning to crap. It was definitely less than a month ago, right around the Net Neutrality ruling though.

I have no other problems with other streaming/downloading.

I wouldn't put it past Verizon to learn the speed test sites and leave them out of the throttling.

I consistently get less than my advertised speeds, except for (legal) torrents. Linux ISOs (torrent) come in full speed. Anything else, I regard as a crapshoot. You don't know enough to know if its the remote system, the remote ISP, or yours.

Downloads from my web host saturate my connection (75/35) if I use their NY data centers. The more distant ones (California, Europe) speed up to about a third of that before they finish downloading, but they might have eventually maxed out if the file sizes were bigger. I highly doubt that they are specifically detecting and cheating the speed tests.

Hit the signup button, and if you qualify you will be provided a nice wifi router capable of IPV6 with at least 5 GbE ports. This will sit between you and your internet connection and when your connection is idle will preform speed-tests of upload and download rates. It will also measure connection uptime, packet-loss, ping-time and several other useful things. At the end of the month you will receive a report-card for your connection. There is currently a waiting list, but don't let that discourage you.

I got a Netgear WNR3500L out of the deal which is a sweet piece of equipment. The only caveat for the Ars crowd is you can't run DDWRT or modify the firmware, otherwise the settings are yours' to modify as you see fit.

Also if you like signup to buy the box they offer for free at the above link here, http://www.samknows.com/broadband/buy_whitebox at this time they have no plans to sell the boxes because they haven't seen enough interest. Let's change their mind.

I'm not sure how much more specific the evidence needs to get before you would believe that something is amiss with Verizon's service, Peter.

Twice before, I have cited this example from my own personal life. One of the beautiful parts of working from home is that I get to test these things during the workday, before primetime congestion should even be a factor.

I have issues with Netflix coming in at sub-SD quality (though in the past, it worked beautifully), but Amazon Instant works at 1080p with 5.1 audio. However, that doesn't mean that much, as they are coming from two different sources. Though I do believe Netflix's streaming solution to be more efficient than Amazon's, I have no proof of it.

YouTube is my primary, go-to example. I pull up a video on my phone while connected to Wi-Fi (standing only 4 feet from the router). It can barely play for a few seconds before it has to stop and buffer some more. I turn off Wi-Fi on the phone, dumping back to Verizon's LTE and the same video fully buffers in a second and plays through to completion. The last time I conducted this test, I had 3/5 bars of signal and Speedtested my LTE connection at 13.49/2.76 with 40ms ping. With the exception of the ping, that's right on target for my older FiOS service plan. So it wasn't a considerable speed difference that let the video buffer faster.

A new wrinkle to this is that I can frequently pull up the exact same YouTube video on my work laptop- which is VPN'd to the corporate network- without issue. While trying to do so on my personal computer yields the same results as my phone on Wi-Fi.

In the case of the VPN vs. home connection, maybe that's just congestion between myself and the CDN that isn't present between the VPN gateway and the CDN. What about the Verizon Wireless vs. Verizon FiOS example? The most logical place to connect the backhaul for the local cell tower would be the very same building that hosts the endpoint for my FiOS connection (about 1.5 miles southwest of me.) If that's the case, then shouldn't my cellphone see the same congestion issues?

If the issue was between the building and my house, shouldn't I see the congestion issues through the VPN connection?

I get what you're saying. You're trying to be scientific about it. The guy's "evidence" is utter crap and it doesn't definitively tell us anything useful. There are too many confounding factors. Unfortunately, most home internet users don't have very many options with regard to tests that we can perform. My own experience tells me that there is something seriously amiss, and it has been since well before the Net Neutrality decision. It started with YouTube performance, and progressed to Netflix. I fully anticipate that Amazon will be next.

Maybe his account doesn't give us the irrefutable evidence that we need. But there sure as hell is something going on here. And I would suggest that maybe you try to arrange for some independent testing to be done because, quite frankly, I don't think any of us are going to be able to produce results that meet your standards.

"As tempting as it may be when frustrated that your Internet connection isn't working as well as it should be, it's simply not fair to ask that kind of question to a low-level support person, much less use a chat transcript to accuse companies of widely unpopular behavior."

Not fair??! How is it not fair??!

Verizon chooses who they hire as tech support. They train them. They use them as the point of contact for customers who have issues using their services.

If Verizon is negligent in this.. and hire unqualified people, and don't train them properly.. who else is to blame but Verizon?

No, it's totally fair to expect to be given correct information by tech support.

"Is Verizon now limiting bandwidth to cloud providers like Amazon's AWS services?""Yes it is limited bandwidth to cloud providers"

"And this is why my netflix quality is also bad now""Yes, exactly"

I call that a smoking gun.

I find it amusing that you believe that they train them. These are more likely to be plebs at the bottom of the income food chain, who are given a sheet of sample answers and tests to keep the customer happy and on their way. Do you actually believe that they are trained and competent at doing tech support?